Malcom Gladwell has a tremendous ability to detect trends and patterns in places where most people see chaos. He dispassionately analyzes his chosen subjects deeply, and presents insights which are often challenging but unimpeachable. But something must have rattled him during his recent investigation of personality tests, because he turned out anuncharacteristically flimsy and defensivepiece [...]
Recently one of the teams in my division used a mock competition based on ‘The Apprentice’ as a team building exercise. Luckily nobody got fired, and it turned out to be a good team builder. But I somehow doubt that thereality TV show as actually practiced demonstrates a good way to get people in a [...]
Tim Bray is speculating about how you could use your blog to interfere with a person’s chances at employment or procreation:
?Suppose I posted a piece here whose title was that person?s name, laying out in succinct but forceful detail the nature of the bad behavior, solidly illustrated by pointers to online examples. Suppose I offered [...]
At Microsoft, we sometimes use ?personas? when designing features and writing specs. A ?persona? is an imaginary character we invent to embody a set of characteristics for a particular target group of users. For example, ?Jane is an MBA who has a job in the IT department at a major insurance company. She writes code, [...]
Eminem. Young adults don’t like being treated like children, told what to think. That’s why Eminem is so popular among the under-30 crowd. He has been a master at sensing out the prevailing rules of youth conduct and doing exactly the opposite of what propriety suggested. Even when America was gripped in the patriotic fervor [...]